Throughout Good Omens, Crowley and Aziraphale talk often about what they call the “Ineffable Plan”—that is, God’s plan for Earth. According to the Bible, this plan ends with Armageddon and the final fall of humanity. This fate seems inevitable, as divine beings like Crowley (a demon), Aziraphale (an angel), and Adam (the Antichrist) are supposedly bound by prophecy and have no choice but to follow the path that God has laid out. However, this simplistic way of looking at destiny doesn’t fully encompass how the world works—while destiny and free will might seem like opposing ideas that can’t coexist, the truth is actually far more complex. Good Omens suggests that prophecies are self-fulfilling—that is, someone’s belief in destiny is what makes that destiny come true. Furthermore, even in the face of terrifying prophecies, people can still make choices that change the future.
The novel casts destiny as an inevitable fact of life for all its characters. Within the world of the novel, Crowley and Aziraphale work on Earth for their employers (Hell and Heaven, respectively, which are described as being like governments or businesses). Their jobs largely consist of meddling in human affairs, pushing people toward good or evil. They’re supposed to continue until Armageddon, the final battle between Heaven and Hell, arrives. This is all part of the Ineffable Plan, and Crowley and Aziraphale don’t feel as though they can go against what they believe is predestined to happen. Thus, when they learn that the Antichrist has been sent to Earth and will bring about Armageddon after his 11th birthday, Crowley and Aziraphale feel stuck. Though Hell encourages rebellion in a general sense, it doesn’t encourage its own employees—like Crowley—to push back against its machinations. And similarly, if the Antichrist’s arrival is part of the Ineffable Plan, Aziraphale doesn’t feel like he has the power to do anything to stop it. Destiny, in this sense, initially constrains Crowley and Aziraphale and makes them feel powerless to try to stop Armageddon—which they believe is the right thing to do regardless of what the Ineffable Plan has to say on the matter.
However, although destiny seems inevitable, the novel also suggests that the particulars of any given prophecy are up for interpretation. For instance, Anathema Device and many of her ancestors have spent the last 300 years trying to deduce prophecies made by their 17th-century ancestor, the witch Agnes Nutter. Within the world of the novel, Agnes Nutter happens to be the only prophet in all of human history who ever made correct predictions. However, since Armageddon takes place in the late 20th century, and Agnes made her predictions in the 17th century, deciphering her thousands of prophecies is a difficult task. After all, Agnes was making her predictions long before things like cars and electricity were invented, so any of her prophecies concerning modern technology are nearly unintelligible. Thus, Anathema explains that it’s usually impossible to figure out what Agnes meant until after the prophecies come true; they only make sense in retrospect. This introduces one of the novel’s most important ideas concerning destiny: that it seems real and important simply because people believe in it. Agnes’s predictions seem to come true because Anathema’s family goes to the trouble of matching the predictions to world events—but if they didn’t, it’s possible that Agnes’s predictions could refer to any number of events.
Indeed, Good Omens ultimately proposes that free will and destiny are actually two sides of the same coin. Though Crowley and Aziraphale are initially paralyzed by the thought they’re powerless to save the world from Armageddon, they decide that they should try anyway. After all, as Crowley points out, Aziraphale is bound as an angel to thwart any evil plans he stumbles across—and the looming threat of Armageddon is nothing if not an evil plan. As Crowley and Aziraphale work together to keep Armageddon from happening, they justify their rebellion by reasoning that their actions are probably part of a much larger plan and not actually free will at all. The difference between destiny and free will is, in this sense, simply a matter of perspective. And later, at the moment when the 11-year-old Antichrist, Adam, is supposed to mobilize the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and bring about Armageddon, he refuses. Though various figures from Heaven and Hell insist that “it is written” that Adam must bring about Armageddon, Adam calmly says, “I don’t see why it matters what is written. Not when it’s about people. It can always be crossed out.” In support of this, Crowley and Aziraphale suggest that the course of events might be written differently elsewhere—and, for that matter, the very point of the Ineffable Plan is that it’s unknowable and subject to change at any minute. With this, Adam, Crowley, and Aziraphale propose that destiny isn’t set in stone. Destiny is whatever people make of it—and though it’s impossible to know for sure, it seems clear that people’s choices of what to believe are far more important and meaningful than destiny itself.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Destiny vs. Free Will ThemeTracker
Destiny vs. Free Will Quotes in Good Omens
And that’d be that. No more world. That’s what the end of the world meant. No more world. Just endless Heaven or, depending on who won, endless Hell. Crowley didn’t know which was worse.
Well, Hell was worse, of course, by definition. But Crowley remembered what Heaven was like, and it had quite a few things in common with Hell. You couldn’t get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell.
But there was no getting out of it. You couldn’t be a demon and have free will.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.
Aziraphale had tried to explain it to him once. The whole point, he’d said [...] was that when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley and, of course, himself, were set in their ways right from the start. People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
They’d come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully functioning human brain could conceive, then shout “The Devil Made Me Do It” and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn’t have to. That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn’t a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley’s opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.
“You don’t have to be so lit’ral about everything,” he said. “That’s the trouble these days. Grass materialism. ‘S people like you who go round choppin’ down rain forests and makin’ holes in the ozone layer. There’s a great big hole in the ozone layer ‘cos of grass materialism people like you.”
“You see, it’s not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means. Agnes was like someone looking at a huge picture down a tiny little tube. She wrote down what seemed like good advice based on what she understood of the tiny little glimpses.”
1111. An the Great Hound sharl coom, and the Two Powers sharl watch in Vane, for it Goeth where is its Master, where they Wot Notte, and he sharl name it, True to Ittes Nature, and Hell sharl flee it.
Dog slunk along with his tail between his legs, whining.
This wasn’t right, he was thinking. Just when I was getting the hang of rats. Just when I’d nearly sorted out that bloody German Shepherd across the road. Now He’s going to end it all and I’ll back with the ole glowin’ eyes and chasin’ lost souls. What’s the sense in that? They don’t fight back, and there’s no taste to ‘em...
“Oh, if that’s all that’s worryin’ you, don’t you worry,” said Adam airily, “’cos I could make you all just do whatever I wanted—”
He stopped, his ears listening in horror to the words his mouth was speaking. The Them were backing away.
[...]
“No,” he said hoarsely. “No. Come back! I command you!”
They froze in mid-dash.
Adam stared.
“No, I dint mean it—” he began. “You’re my friends—”
[...]
Adam opened his mouth and screamed. It was a sound that a merely mortal throat should not have been able to utter [...]
Whatever had been standing in the old quarry before, Adam Young was standing there now. A more knowledgeable Adam Young, but Adam Young nevertheless. Possibly more of Adam Young than there had ever been before.
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, he said. SURELY YOUR VERY EXISTENCE REQUIRES THE ENDING OF THE WORLD. IT IS WRITTEN.
“I dunt see why anyone has to go an’ write things like that,” said Adam calmly. “The world is full of all sorts of brilliant stuff and I haven’t found out all about it yet, so I don’t want anyone messing it about or endin’ it before I’ve had a chance to find out about it. So you can all just go away.”
Everyone found their eyes turning toward Adam. He seemed to be thinking very carefully.
Then he said: “I don’t see why it matters what is written. Not when it’s about people. It can always be crossed out.”
He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.
